ON THE NAMING OF THINGS
or, writing through a creative impasse
Origin. Aspiration. Virtue.
We dream in a series of still frames,
but it’s the artist who animates.
On the seventh day,
God rested.
But before the cosmos:
the aching void.
A pen before the page.
The yolk before the egg.
It’s love that conjures the beloved.
Some say the universe
is made of math.
My son speaks numbers,
is fluent in addition, abstraction—
a sculptor of possibilities,
a believer in probabilities.
He’s an optimist.
Our hopes multiply in the making.
I’ve been packaging hard truths
into soft syllables,
rationing slivers of daylight
over wintered rows of words.
This morning, a golden dew
alighted split soil,
whispered a language of sweetness—
a reassurance of returns.
It said: these fields shall birth
new verse again.
There is joy
in the quiet naming of things.
Author’s Statement:
This work emerged during a season of creative impasse, when language felt scarce and faith in the work felt fragile. I was thinking about beginnings, how naming, attention, and love precede creation, and how meaning often arrives before form. Watching my son delight in numbers, and noticing small, ordinary signs of return in the natural world reminded me that making is an act of hope, and that even in silence, something is always preparing to be born.
Christen Lee is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of the debut chapbook The Earth Can’t Tilt Toward Darkness Forever (Moonstone Arts Center, 2025). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Dulcet Lit, Heartwood, Querencia Press, Aurora, Encephalon, In Parentheses, and The Elevation Review, among others.
IceFloe Press 